“A kind of fierce”, by Katerina Andreou, is a performance where images and adjectives can hover over action. To write about this work implies capturing random and sparse associations but also to let these sparse images take root and be grounded in thought. In a way, it can be difficult to describe and depict Andreou’s performance but it can be quite easy to activate a dreaming quality and let images be ‘cultivated’ in our imagination:

Throughout the performance, one has a feeling of visiting a dance and then revisiting paths to see this dance using other movements and intensities as guides/lenses. Choreography becomes perhaps a meta-choreography for other movements to appear, a soil where images tend to instaure real concrete figures and then they disappear. That is why abstraction is not an acceptable track to fit this piece. It is far more intriguing to imagine the fragile yet electric body of Katerina Andreou next to the concrete title of the work “A kind of fierce”.

Andreou’s presence is defined and confused, firm and abandoned, concrete and abstract, young and old. She has everything to be the opposite of fierce, even though she strives for it all the way long: she is fierce in looking for a kind of fierceness. In this quest, we see a series of self-determined choices that are voluntarily abandoned or replaced for others, as if dramaturgy was a game about staging and displaying free will: the paradox of organizing a structure for disobedience.

In this line of thinking, one cannot say that “A kind of fierce” is merely about starting choreography and re-organizing it in space. One must imagine that the stage where Andreou hangs around, oscillates between being an arena, a house, a space divided in two, a place where the one who dances is the same who disappears through movement. By unlearning space, choreography is much more about misunderstanding than about distribution. Choreography is put against the idea of a machine of intentionalities.

Considering this fictional and perhaps mythological space, arms and hair are perhaps the closest elements to wings and trampolines. Sporadically, we have the feeling of watching a work about elevation - the same that ballet sought in a geometric and tense forms - but subtly expressed here through clouds of movement or clusters of evanescent stamina. But, like any other free association, even this interpretation should be grown in the air, like airponic agriculture that plans to grow vegetables in the outer space.

The promise of this piece is thus as radical as unthinkable: to cultivate a soil for fierceness in the verge of abandonment and extreme vulnerability. As radical and concrete as saying that any future is unthinkable and yet we are thinking about it.

("A kind of fierce", by Katerina Andreou, was shown in the Athens and Epidaurus Festival in June)

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This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.